Reporting Suicides

Should the newspapers report suicides? The answer lies with the
newsworthiness of a particular suicide.Suicides that serves
little in terms of larger public interest are better left out from the media.
The cardinal principle is not to glorify suicide and underplay a
revenge aspect, if any.

Dowry related suicides might have a revenge
aspect to it. The better course here would be to highlight the police
case against the in laws or others than the suicide itself.

Few would doubt that a suicide like that of the British weapons expert,
David Kelly, should be reported in detail. However, when it comes to
the suicide of the engineering college student (Rajani S. Anand) in Kerala who committed
suicide allegedly because she could not get funding for her studies,
the issue becomes tricky.

Psychologists say most of the suicide victims
have some sort of mental illness at the time of their committing
suicide. So, issues such as poverty only become a background for
suicides. It is better stated as such.

Several newspapers in the State can be said to have sensationalised the
suicide. Yet, it is notable that the outcome was not negative. Though
certain ways of reporting suicides can influence others to commit
suicide, the reporting of the college student’s action did not lead to
any ‘copycat’ suicides.

However, ‘copycat’ suicides must have occurred in the case of farmer’s
suicides in the State. (The danger of imitations is higher when the
visual media reports them.) So, the question that arises is whether the
media should have avoided reporting of hundreds of suicides and instead
limited the coverage to publication of statistics and other relevant
information.

It was a significant number of reports about suicides that appeared
over a short period that attracted public attention to the farmer’s
suicides and the high rate of suicides in the State, particularly, the
agrarian districts of Idukki and Wayanad.

The Government initially
suppressed or misinterpreted the statistics. So, the facts might not
have come to light unless some newspapers reported even the suicides of
ordinary farmers. This shows that the canvas of public interest and
newsworthiness of suicides is wide.

One glaring lapse in reporting death by suicide
of Rajani S.Anand was a certain, perhaps, unintended indifference to the
probable impact on impressionable minds. Both print and
electronic media could have tried to take comments from sociologists,
psychologists and psychiatrists on suicide prevention. Such stories
running parallel to Rajani reportage would have checked an inadvertent
romanticsing or glorification of the Dalit student's option of death
by suicide as the final solution to her life of deprivations.

Journalists may be sensitive or insensitive but some education is
called for in getting one's sensibilities right. For instance,
journalists with a strong Catholic upbringing start off with an inherent sensibility
disadvantage in reporting suicides.

The Church frowns on suicides. Job
is the icon of the ideal sufferer who clings to his faith and finally gets
deliverance from Yehova. The Church has never sainted a suicide victim.
Rather the Church's gallery is full of martyrs who encounter death
bravely. So suicide is bad and sinful for a Catholic. Such a catechism
would have already desensitised the journalist to suicides, which are
undesirable and un-Christian acts. Though this may not be quite evident
in the journalist, at the subconscious level such a slant might be real.

Journalists with such a background might err in not being subtle with
suicide reporting, that is, not showing empathy to the victim as well as those on
the brink.